People have vastly different ways of coping with the loss of a loved one. My grandfather, Robert W. Peterson, began discarding his wife’s clothes even as she lay on her hospital bed, dying a slow and painful death from pancreatic cancer. This was in 1969. He seemed determined to erase every reminder of his wife of nearly fifty years from the house. Her shoes, boots, gloves, handbag, aprons, hairbrush and comb, a spare pair of eyeglasses––all of these had to go. My grandfather was a broken man.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her,” he said a few days before Mildred’s death.

A couple of months later, still feeling sorry for himself and desperate for companionship, he hooked up with a widow, perhaps twenty years younger than he was, whom he had met while sitting on a bench along the promenade in Perth Amboy. I don’t believe that he experienced more than a brief moment of happiness in this relationship. One day he came to our house in New Brunswick. He had brought his new wife along, but she remained outside in the car. Grandpa was teary-eyed and not making much sense. He stayed for a mere fifteen minutes. No one thought to invite his wife into the house. So we never caught more than a distant glimpse of this mystery woman as she waited in the car.

Grandpa collapsed from a sudden heart attack the day after he had painted the walls of his bathroom in an apparent attempt to please his new wife. God knows where this woman was as her husband lay sprawled, naked, on the bedroom floor. Robert W. Peterson was alone when he died, except for his faithful chihuahua, Tiny. The police had to break into the house after neighbors reported mail piling up in the small mailbox, or simply dropped on the front step.

When we saw his body in the funeral home, he still had spots of blue paint on his fingers––the color he had painted the bathroom walls. We never saw his widow in the funeral home. The gold digger had done all right for herself. She inherited the house, an insurance policy, and her husband’s bank accounts. Not a bad payoff for a few months’ work. During our last visit to the empty house, we could not find any reminders of Mildred Peterson. There was not a single photograph of her. Even her old Singer sewing machine was gone.

Completely erased. But I don’t believe that Grandpa’s efforts brought him any comfort. After Bob died in 1990, my mother suggested that we donate his clothes to the Purple Heart, a charitable organization that conducted several clothing drives every year. I, however, decided to start wearing my father’s old clothes. It did not bother me at all to put on a dead man’s clothes. In fact, I found it a comfort, even though father’s jacket was a bit snug on me. The only items we donated were father’s shoes, which were a size too small for me. Over the years, I have worn out two or three of Father’s flannel shirts, discarding them only after they became too frayed to wear in public.

My mother has been gone for well over a year now. But all of her clothes still hang in her closet. Her cane and her favorite buckled shoes still rest on the wicker basket at the foot of her bed, where she left them before she became bedridden. Downstairs, one of her sweaters is draped over the arm of a rocking chair. Her two downstairs canes remain where she placed them. If my mother could miraculously return to life, she would find all of her things exactly where she left them. The only item of Mother’s that I have been able to dispose of is a pair of pants that I intended to give her for Christmas in 2016. But by the time Christmas came around, the pants turned out to be too small for her. She was no longer a size 12. She now weighed a bit over over 150 pounds, having secretly consumed all of the leftover Halloween candy as well as two tins of Danish butter cookies I had bought for Christmas. She was shocked when I told her that she now weighed more than I did. Her favorite jacket would no longer zip up.

Maybe one day I’ll start wearing her jacket. It fits me.